About
We help you save on your electric bill.
Powerful insights to help you better manage your energy consumption.
Have you ever been surprised by an electric bill?
Like, knock the wind out of you surprised?
The worst part is, you've already spent your money before you've even seen your bill, so you can't do anything to lower the cost.
You see, I'm not originally from Texas, and I still tend to forget to renew my energy plan. So a few summers ago – during the insanity of COVID – I completely missed to renew my rate plan, my energy bill almost doubled, and I had the uniquely Texan experience to go shopping for electricity.
The whole process of getting access to my data and selecting a plan took way too much time and felt almost purposefully complicated.
What was really interesting, however, was that there were some fascinating insights buried in the data.
Through some simple and relatively painless changes around the house, we were able to reduce our energy footprint by over 6%.
Now 6% might not sound like much, but that was almost $100 in annual savings.
Said another way, that's the equivalent of 600 pounds of coal being burned, which would have otherwise released more than twelve hundred pounds of harmful CO2 into the atmosphere.
And I immediately thought, wow, this is just my house. And it was so easy. What if we could scale this across Houston? What about across Texas? Imagine the impact we could have on savings. On sustainability!
And just like that, I became a believer.
My “light bulb” moment. (Get it?)
An under-served population.
Did you know a staggering 33% of Texans struggle to pay an electric bill at least once per year?
Millions of Texans are in the difficult position of having to choose between paying an electric bill or buying food and other necessities.
Fortunately I have a great job, so when my bill almost doubled – it was mostly just an inconvenience.
For my friends who were out of work due to COVID, or for my mom on a fixed income, that unbudgeted expense could have meant the difference between buying groceries and eating peanut butter & jelly sandwiches.
That didn’t sit right with me. As a kid, I remember having our lights turned out during some hard times. This problem just felt too simple not to solve.
At Smart Watts, we tap into the smart meter already installed in your home to give you a free energy monitoring dashboard, so you can make smarter decisions about your energy use.
We connect to your home's existing smart meter – so there's no hardware to install – and our service is energy-provider agnostic, which means nothing changes when you switch your energy plan. You can think of us as a Fitbit for your electric meter.
We've learned active monitoring can reduce energy usage by 5 to 15%, which is roughly the equivalent of getting one month free of electricity every year.
Yet, of the nearly 9 millions households in Texas with a smart meter installed, only 2% are registered to access this data. This highlights that the process to access the data and draw meaningful insights is too cumbersome.
This is especially true for people who might not have the time or technical ability to properly analyze the data – who are the same individuals most at-risk of price fluctuations.
We help you take your power back.
We want to make energy simple.
At Smart Watts, we believe there's a better way to manage your energy.
• We believe everyone should have access to timely data so you can change behaviors before you get your electric bill.
• We believe everyone should get a simple notification before your rate plan expires and you are unknowingly switched to a premium plan.
• We believe you should own your energy data, and that simple energy monitoring should be free, accessible, and independent of your energy provider.
• And finally, we believe in energy equality and fair play, and right now, the market is a little out of balance.
Our lofty goal is to register twenty-thousand Texans in year-one, and by helping folks make smarter decisions about their energy use, we’re going to reduce power consumption by 15 gigawatts a year.
Okay, so 15 gigawatts, how much is that really?
Well, it’s a lot of power. Actually, it’s enough energy to power 1,200 homes for a full year.
So you can see with a bit of scale, we can make a significant impact on energy savings and sustainability.
We’re on a mission to realize the promise of deregulation – to pay less for electricity, to reduce energy consumption, and to make the Texas grid more resilient.
Join us at SmartWatts, and let’s take our power back!
Together, a brighter energy future.
Click infographic to enlarge.
"We can’t fix the problem overnight—but if we take bold, transformative action to lead our city down a more sustainable path, we’ll leave behind a better Houston, and a better world, for future generations."
Mayor Sylvester Turner
City of Houston